October 8, 2013

Like Hercules assigned to clean the Augean stables, curator Danielle Benden was hired by the UW-Madison anthropology department in 2007 to sort and systematize the final resting place for the department's collection of pots, bones, baskets, spear points, clothing, musical instruments, kayaks and effigies.

The collection in the Department of Anthropology repository was gathered on six continents by roving UW-Madison anthropologists for more than a century. Then it began gathering dust in a warehouse....

Wasn't there something about the world's first archeological museum having been excavated in Mesopotamia, Babylonian IIRC? (No, looks like it was Neo-Babylonian.) So the archeology of lost archeological archives is at least eighty-some years old.

I once had a tour of the bowels of the natural history museum in Chicago. Donor perk that a friend shared. We had a couple of anthropologist guides. Just a mind boggling array of stuff. Much of which is not cataloged.

This sounds like a very worthwhile enterprise. In both archaeology and anthropology (and probably a lot of other ologies), from time to time you read about someone who has applied new techniques, or recent discoveries, to some old and almost-forgotten item that was gathering dust in some collection, and as a result come up with some new understanding or insight. That process requires not only that these old items be preserved, but also that they be catalogued. The creation of searchable databases that could be accessed by scholars in the relevant fields, with lots of information about all the things lying around in heaps and confusion, could lead to lots of valuable discoveries.

The creation of searchable databases that could be accessed by scholars in the relevant fields, with lots of information about all the things lying around in heaps and confusion, could lead to lots of valuable discoveries.

It could, but it's difficult to maintain databases over long periods of time. The technology keeps changing and it can be progressively difficult to keep moving old data forward. At some point, even common files like JPEG images won't be accessable because they're out of date. Have you tried accessing a floppy disk lately? Ultimately, all of today's digital technology is liable to be unreadable at some point.

They can't make sense of the stuff they've dug up??In a sensible world this would hearld the defunding of archeology as an academic discipline. It would demote it into the ghetto occupied by all the "studies" departments. i.e. American studies to pick the least worst of them.

When they built the new Sam Noble Museum in Norman, they had the chance to unpack/unclog decades of stuff that they'd never had the room to deal with before, let alone display. They also found a LOT of stuff they had no records of: stuff dug up in the 1930's-40's, brought back, and the paperwork was lost or destroyed.

This included a fossil of a species of turtle previously unknown, and the damn thing's shell is about six feet long; it'd been sitting in a crate for almost 70 years, with nobody knowing it was there.